High-speed electro-optic modulation in silicon is a crucial technology for the integration of silicon photonics with microelectronics, and in particular, for overcoming the bandwidth limitations of metal interconnections. High-speed gigabits per second modulators have been demonstrated recently using either resonant structures (Q. Xu, B. Schmidt, S. Pradhan, and M. Lipson, Nature 435, 325 (2005); B. Schmidt, Q. Xu, J. Shakya, S. Manipatruni, and M. Lipson, Opt. Express 15, 3140 (2007); L. Zhou and A. W. Poon, Opt. Express 14, 6851 (2006)) or Mach-Zehnder interferometers (A. Liu, R. Jones, L. Liao, D. Samara-Rubio, D. Rubin, O. Cohen, R. Nicolaescu, and M. Paniccia, Nature 427, 615 (2004); S. J. Spector, M. W. Geis, G.-R. Zhou, M. E. Grein, F. Gan, M. A. Popovic, J. U. Yoon, D. M. Lennon, E. P. Ippen, F. Z. Kartner, and T. M. Lyszczarz, Opt. Express 16, 11027 (2008); W. M. Green, M. J. Rooks, L. Sekaric, and Y. A. Vlasov, Opt. Express 15, 17106 (2007)). Resonant electro-optic modulators are ideally suited for dense optical networks on chips due to their compact size, high extinction ratio (ER) per unit length, low insertion loss, and low power consumption. However, resonant electro-optic modulators suffer from temperature sensitivity owing to the relatively large thermo-optic effect in silicon (M. Lipson, IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 12, 1520 (2006)).
Thus a chief drawback of current, art-known resonator-based silicon electro-optic modulators is that their performance is sensitive to thermal variations. There is therefore a need in the art for an apparatus and method for maintaining high quality electro-optic modulation in the presence of thermal variations from the surroundings.
Citation or identification of any reference in Section 2, or in any other section of this application, shall not be considered an admission that such reference is available as prior art to the present invention.